Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers

Master interviewer Bálint András Varga poses three probing questions to renowned contemporary composers about their work, and carefully renders their answers in their own words.Do today's composers draw inspiration from life experiences or from, say, the natural world? What influences, past and present, have influenced recent composers? How essential is it for a composer to develop a personal style, and when does this degenerate into self-repetition? These are questions about which some of the most important composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century often have quite strong feelings--but have seldom been asked. In this pathbreaking book, Bálint András Varga puts these three questions to such renowned composers as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Alberto Ginastera, Sofia Gubaidulina, Hans Werner Henze, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, Witold Lutoslawski, Luigi Nono, Krzysztof Penderecki, Wolfgang Rihm, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Toru Takemitsu, and Iannis Xenakis. Varga's sensitive English renderings capture the subtleties of their sometimes confident, sometimes hesitant, answers. All statements from English-speaking composers -- such as Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Steve Reich, Gunther Schuller, andSir Michael Tippett -- consist of the composers' own carefully chosen words. Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers is vital reading for anybody interested in the current state of music and the arts. TheHungarian music publisher Bálint András Varga has spent nearly forty years working for and with composers. He has published several books, including extensive interviews with Lutoslawski, Berio, and Xenakis. His previous book forthe University of Rochester Press is György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages.

Revealing [new statements from] . . . the majority of the defining figures of Western music since 1945. . . . Extremely informative and carefully edited. . . . A broad panorama of contemporary music, showcasing many major artistic isssues and illustrating the enormous diversity of the international scene., The responses vary greatly in length and complexity . . . [but] the variety, together with the lucidity of the responses, makes for a more engaging read. . . . One of the more thought-provoking books on modern music., The responses from . . . Mauricio Kagel, Helmut Lachenmann, and Iannis Xenakis . . . are as lucid an introduction to their musical preoccupations as could be hoped. Production values are as consistently high as one expects from the University of Rochester Press. . . . The most illuminating such symposium of composers cast 'in their own words.' Absorbing and highly pleasurable reading can be assured., Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary music., In this rich book conceived by Bálint András Varga, eminent composers of different generations converse with each other through their highly distinctive answers to three recurring, probing questions. Each page of this book is haunted by questions of memory --